Bush Inc.

From the outset, the opportunities that eventually led to Bush's eventual baseball bonanza intertwined politics and business, crony capitalist style. The limited partnership that financed Arbusto, his first oil firm, included George W.'s grandmother Dorothy Bush; Rite Aid drugstores chairman Lewis Lehrman, then a rising force in New York Republican politics; William Draper III, a corporate executive and family friend who was later appointed by his father to head the Export-Import Bank; and James Bath, a mysterious Houston aircraft broker who served as a front man for several Saudi Arabian sheiks. About $3 million poured into Arbusto, producing little oil and no profits but expansive tax shelters.

In 1982 George W. changed the infelicitous name Arbusto to Bush Exploration Oil Company. His father by then was Vice President of the United States, but the new company name didn't improve matters. More than once, George W.'s venture was near ruin when wealthy benefactors suddenly appeared with fresh cash. The most generous was Philip Uzielli, an old Princeton buddy of James Baker III, the family friend then serving as Chief of Staff in the Reagan White House. For the sum of $1 million, Uzielli bought 10 percent of the company at a time in 1982 when the entire enterprise was valued at less than $400,000.

Soon Uzielli's million was gone, too. But just as Bush Exploration was heading toward failure, George W. met William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, a pair of Ohio investors with their own small oil firm, called Spectrum 7. After a quick courtship, the Spectrum 7 partners agreed to merge with Bush Exploration, naming George W. as chairman and CEO and awarding him a substantial share of stock. Although the Vice President's son helped Spectrum 7 to raise additional money, catastrophic losses continued. Then George W. attracted yet another financial savior.

That September, Harken Energy Corporation, a midsized firm, stepped in to acquire Spectrum 7. For his worthless company, Harken gave Bush $600,000 worth of its publicly traded stock, plus a seat on its board of directors and a consultancy that paid him up to $120,000 a year. His partners understood perfectly what had happened. As Spectrum 7's former President Paul Rea later recalled, the Harken management "believed having George's name there would be a big help to them."

In 1987 Bush moved his family from Texas to Washington, where he served as "senior adviser" in his father's presidential campaign. Not long before Election Day, he heard from his former Spectrum 7 partner Bill DeWitt that the Texas Rangers were on the market. To make a successful bid, DeWitt would need Texas backers, and the son of the incoming President was perfectly situated to find them. George W. also had a powerful advantage in dealing with the team's owner, an aging oil millionaire named Eddie Chiles, who had been a Bush family friend in Midland, Texas, for more than thirty years.

Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth was eager to help the son of the new President, but wasn't happy that Bush's two biggest investors were the New York film financiers Roland Betts and Tom Bernstein. The indispensable local money came from Richard Rainwater, formerly the chief financial adviser to the Bass brothers of Fort Worth. Little known to the general public, Rainwater was famous on Wall Street for growing the Bass inheritance from around $50 million in 1970 to more than $4 billion by the time he left in 1986 to manage his own investments.

After Bush and Ueberroth met with him in early 1989, Rainwater took effective control of the deal, bringing along Edward "Rusty" Rose, a well-known Dallas investor, to oversee the franchise. Under an agreement worked out by Betts and Rainwater, the President's son would serve as the new ownership's public face while Rose ran the business.

Bush's stake in the team, just under 2 percent, was among the smallest. He purchased his shares with a $500,000 loan from a Midland bank of which he had been a director and eventually scraped together $106,000 more to buy out two other limited partners. Two months after his father's inauguration, George W. Bush called a press conference in Arlington to announce that the Rangers sale had been successfully completed for a price that was later reported to be $86 million. While Rainwater, Rose, Betts, and all the other partners remained in the background, George W. greeted the public as if he were "the owner" of the Rangers. He attended every home game and even printed baseball cards bearing his own picture to hand out from his box.

Meanwhile, he maintained a financial interest in Harken Energy. He had been granted enough additional stock options, at a generous discount, to increase his holdings by more than half. By 1989, however, those shares were falling in value. A series of questionable decisions by Chairman Alan Quasha had jeopardized the company's future, and its losses reached $40 million in 1990. Even the company's CEO admitted that its financial statements were "a mess."

Once more, however, the Bush name provided sudden deliverance -- in the form of a contract with the emirate of Bahrain. Until 1989 the Bahraini oil minister had been negotiating an agreement for offshore drilling with Amoco, a huge energy conglomerate with decades of worldwide experience. Those talks were abruptly broken off. Then, through a former Mobil executive working on retainer for the State Department, Bahraini officials were put in touch with Harken.

Industry analysts were astonished by the announcement in January 1990 that Bahrain had awarded exclusive offshore exploration rights to Harken, a debt-ridden company that had never drilled a well anywhere but Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and had never drilled undersea at all. Harken had to bring in the more experienced and solvent Bass brothers, old friends and political supporters of the Bush family, to begin construction on the $25 million project.

Only the presence of President Bush's oldest son could explain the Bahraini ministers' extraordinary decision. "They were clearly aware he was the President's son," said Monte Swetnam, a former Harken executive who conducted the talks with the emirate's oil ministry. George W. denied any part in Harken's bid. "Ask the Bahrainis," he replied flippantly when journalists asked whether the emirate had been enticed by his name.

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